For the month of January, we have lowered the eBook list price of the three available titles in the Studies in Sensory History series to $2.99.
Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell by Jonathan Reinarz
In this comprehensive and engaging volume, medical historian Jonathan Reinarz offers a historiography of smell from ancient to modern times. Synthesizing existing scholarship in the field, he shows how people have relied on their olfactory sense to understand and engage with both their immediate environments and wider corporal and spiritual worlds. With chapters including “Heavenly Scents,” “Fragrant Lucre,” and “Odorous Others,” Reinarz’s timely survey is a useful and entertaining look at the history of one of our most important but least-understood senses. Buy the Kindle version here. Buy the Kobo version here. Buy the Google Play version here. Buy the Nook version here.
The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch by Constance Classen
From the softest caress to the harshest blow, touch lies at the heart of our experience of the world. Now, for the first time, this deepest of senses is the subject of an extensive historical exploration. The Deepest Sense fleshes out our understanding of the past with explorations of lived experiences of embodiment from the Middle Ages to modernity. This intimate and sensuous approach to history makes it possible to foreground the tactile foundations of Western culture–the ways in which feelings shaped society. “Classen’s lush descriptions provide an excellent underscoring of her exploration of this intimate sense.”–Library Journal Buy the Kindle version here. Buy the Kobo version here. Buy the Google Play version here. Buy the Nook version here.
Sonic Persuasion: Reading Sound in the Recorded Age by Greg Goodale
Sonic Persuasion critically analyzes a range of sounds on vocal and musical recordings, on the radio, in film, and in cartoons to show how sounds are used to persuade in subtle ways. Greg Goodale explains how and to what effect sounds can be “read” like an aural text, demonstrating this method by examining important audio cues such as dialect, pausing, and accent in presidential recordings at the turn of the twentieth century. Goodale also shows how clocks, locomotives, and machinery are utilized in film and literature to represent frustration and anxiety about modernity, and how race and other forms of identity came to be represented by sound during the interwar period. Buy the Kindle version here. Buy the Kobo version here. Buy the Google Play version here. Buy the Nook version here.
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